W.C. Heinz performed so splendidly as a correspondent during World War II that upon reporting home, the New York Sun rewarded him with a long vacation, a handsome bonus and a new assignment. Heinz, 32, had proven overseas that he had an uncommon eye for human interest stories, so he was offered a promotion to the Washington bureau. It was a coveted position at which many of his colleagues would have jumped.
However, Bill Heinz turned it down. Ever since he had been a scrawny, 53.5kg high-school boy, Heinz had dreamed of writing about sports for a living, of one day traveling with his athletic idols on the same trains and sharing the same hotels.
It was his belief that in the sports department, he could build on the skills he had developed sending dispatches from Europe and “grow as a writer better than anywhere else on the paper.”
Though far from the bloody battles of the war, sports, he surmised, would provide him with the dramatic parallel of men in competition.
Heinz became a star sports columnist for the Sun, which promoted him in advertisements on the side of delivery trucks. The intuition that steered him away from taking the Washington job proved correct. In his career on the sports beat, he grew in ways that would distinguish him far beyond his column at the Sun, which went out of business in 1950. In addition to his work as an in-demand magazine freelance writer, he wrote a boxing novel that Ernest Hemingway adored (The Professional, 1958), gave us a classic as-told-to with Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi (Run to Daylight! 1963) and, in 1968, pseudonymously was a co-author of the novel M-A-S-H, the basis of the film and television series. He died in 2008.
In recognition of the esteemed place he holds in sports journalism, the Library of America has bestowed upon him a new collection, The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W.C. Heinz. Celebrated sports writing has become an area of concentration for the Library of America, which published American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith (2013) and excellent anthologies on baseball, boxing and football.
Chosen from pieces Heinz wrote for the Sun, a variety of popular magazines and a 1979 collection of his reminiscences, Once They Heard the Cheers, The Top of His Game is a journey back to an era when boxing and horse racing loomed as large in the psyche of the US sports fan as football does today. Along the way, we become reacquainted with two Rockys (Graziano and Marciano), the original Sugar Ray (Robinson) and other stars of the day like Red Grange and Gordie Howe.
However, Heinz was unsurpassed when he was working the offbeat corners of sports. It was in these unexamined shadows that he found his voice. In his classic column Death of a Race Horse, he compels us to look beyond the winner’s circle to an all-too-common event in horse racing, the sudden breakdown of a prized thoroughbred. Only 800 words or so, it is rendered with careful observation and unerring dialogue, hallmarks of Heinz’s style that would be so influential to David Halberstam and other practitioners of the New Journalism a generation later.
Heinz places us in the perimeter surrounding the doomed colt.
“There was a short, sharp sound and the colt toppled onto his left side, his eyes staring, his legs straight out, the free legs quivering.
“’Aw, ----,’ someone said.
“That was all they said. They worked quickly, the two vets removing the broken bones as evidence for the insurance company, the crowd silently watching. Then the heavens opened, the rain pouring down, the lightning flashing, and they rushed for the cover of the stables, leaving alone on his side near the pile of bricks, the rain running off his hide, dead an hour and a quarter after his first start, Air Lift, son of Bold Venture, full brother of Assault.”
This unhappy tale is one of the pieces Heinz is best remembered for, along with some other gems in this collection. There is Brownsville Bum, the story of the prizefighter Al Davis, better known as Bummy, a big-hearted brawler who never backed down from battle, whether in the ring or in the presence of a quartet of gun-wielding thieves. (That encounter did not end well for Bummy.)
There is The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete, the story of Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder Pete Reiser, who was denied true greatness by his proclivity for crashing into walls.
And there is The Happiest Hooligan of Them All, the story of the St Louis Cardinals “Gashouse Gang” third baseman Pepper Martin, who once had the idea of fashioning a piece of pie crust into the form of a baseball and using it to pull off the old hidden ball trick.
“You throw the pie crust ball to the pitcher,” Martin told Heinz. “The runner sees it and steps off the bag. You tag him with the real ball, and meantime, the pitcher eats the pie crust so there’s no evidence.”
Heinz cultivated genuine intimacy with his subjects. In the age before television changed the way sports would be covered, he interviewed them in private settings and over a period of time. Athletes knew and trusted him, understood the value he held for them and were happy to see him come around.
However, it did not always go smoothly.
Of a problem he had with the jockey Eddie Arcaro, who proved elusive before sitting down to a previously agreed-upon interview, Heinz told a friend in The Smallest Titan of Them All: “The writer needs the subject. Eddie Arcaro never needed me.”
Littlefield does a fine job pulling the stories together for this collection, although including two long pieces on the rodeo star Jim Tescher across 48 pages seems excessive. Otherwise, it is a joy to behold Heinz behind the typewriter in The Top of His Game, which is far more comprehensive than two previous compilations of his work. Reading him here once again packs the power of a one-punch knockout.
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